How to stop feeling stuck in your job.

Earlier this year, Bill Gates interviewed Sam Altman (OpenAI), and Sam said something I found interesting: He said, "Most people are mis-calibrated on risk. They are afraid to leave the soft cushy job behind to go do the thing they really want to do. When, in fact, if they don't do that, they'll look back on their lives with regret.”

I talk to people all the time who feel stuck in doing something they don’t want to do.

Most of the time they are under the impression that they are lucky to have their current job and no one else would hire them.

This is a version of imposter syndrome where you feel like you’re going to be “found out” at any moment. You feel like if your employer only knew that you don’t really know what you’re doing, they would fire you.

So many people feel like this.

And it’s almost never true but stems from an inaccurate perspective of ourselves and the value we bring.

So how can we create a more realistic and accurate perspective of ourselves?

We have to pay attention to reality. To what’s going on in this outside world and drop the stories we’ve made up about ourselves.

Creating a practice of accurate self-appraisal takes a while. There’s no hack or shortcut. We have to sit in meditation and learn how to watch our minds. To not get hijacked by our thoughts.

And we have to learn how to rumble with what we see. Writing/journaling allows us to synthesize what we see in meditation. To make sense of it. To see where it stems from or where it shows up in our daily lives.

We start to see the fallacy of these stories we tell ourselves and begin to recognize who we really are and the value that we bring to the world.

Once we see ourselves clearly, we can recalibrate our risk, making the decision to go out and do the thing we’ve always wanted to do in life because we now know we have exactly what it takes to do it!

We stop believing those stories we make up about ourselves and go live out our true potential.